Emelie

Anchored by a spectacularly committed performance by Sarah
Bolger (best known for TV’s “The Tudors” and “Once Upon A Time”), “Emelie” is a
tidy and nasty and often effective thriller that doesn’t quite blossom into
full horror. That might come as something of a relief, as this is a
bad-babysitter movie, one in which three children of fair to more-than-middling
adorableness are threatened and terrorized in increasingly creepy and harrowing
ways.

The movie begins with a terrific hook: the sound of a
seemingly self-absorbed Millennial talking into a cell phone, complaining she
can’t go to some social function because she got rooked into a babysitting job.
We see the young woman, walking down a suburban street in grey weather. A town
car stops, the driver asks the young woman for directions, the young woman gets
off the phone, starts to try to help, and wham, she’s assaulted from behind and
bundled into the car, which drives off. The camera, which was viewing this from
a distance, pans left, and the view of the action is obscured by thick
out-of-focus tree branches. The direction here, by Michael Thelin, a TV and
music video veteran here making his first feature, is assured, almost
inventive. And now the audience knows, right off the bat, that the babysitter later picked up by suburban dad Dan (Chris Beetem) is not who she seems. Dan is
taking his wife out for their thirteenth anniversary (hmmm) and leaving
Bolger’s “Anna” to look after sullen 11-year-old Jacob and super-moppety
Christopher and Sally. At first the new babysitter seems cool—she liberates
Jacob’s game handheld from confiscating mom and tosses it to him with—could it
be?—seductive insouciance. Soon she’s supervising “let’s pretend” games with
the younger kids, letting them tear apart the good living room cushions to make
costumes, and telling them “Pretending is a super power. And when you get
really good at it, nobody can tell you’re pretending anymore.” Things take an
even more “aiiieee” turn during a game of hide-and-seek, in which Jacob finds
“Anna” … sitting on the toilet.

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Jacob’s initially presented as a problem child but it
becomes pretty clear that the scenario is going to call for him to step up to
some kind of plate. He looks into the new sitter’s bag and finds out, among
other things, that her name is not Anna but rather, yup, Emilie. At this point
in the film, which has been pretty relentlessly tense and unnerving, some
conceptual cracks start to show. Emelie’s a malevolent presence, to be sure,
but she’s also someone who wants something, and there’s this thing in movies
like this wherein the ratio of aberrant behavior that’s not useful to the
character’s goal and aberrant behavior that IS useful to the character’s goal
goes somewhat askew for the sake of scares. There’s a point where the audience
member stops thinking, “Yikes, this character is trouble,” and starts thinking,
“Okay, what’s the deal with this weirdo?” So, yes, alas, the movie crosses that
line.

Worse, once the filmmakers get around to illuminating Emelie’s rationale,
the backstory and its attendant components are pretty weak and unconvincing
tea. I know it’s not easy constructing a good satisfying basis for your
evil babysitter but they should have put in a little more effort, frankly; it’s
part of what would have made the difference between an passable, occasionally
interesting thriller and a really outstanding one.

Jacob does step up to the
plate, and the result is reasonably satisfying, but the direction shifts from
tensile to muddy in the run-up to the finale. “Emelie”
has enough good stuff in it that I wished I liked it better, and committed
genre hounds may think I’m nitpicking here. I choose to not, however, complain
about the movie’s weird mix of props: when Emelie shows the kids a very
inappropriate video, it’s from a VHS tape, and on a CRT TV; while there’s
plenty of cell-phone communication here, it’s mostly on flip models, and a
touch-tone desk phone features prominently. I fretted a bit about all this
anachronistic hardware, but then I saw in the credits that the movie was shot
in Buffalo, New York, and it all made sense; those people hang on to old tech
out of spite.